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Convinced that religion is still at the center of much historical experience and
insistent that public discourse about religion could greatly benefit from a firmer
grasp of historical understanding, the editors of Faithful
Narratives, Andrea Sterk and Nina Caputo, have produced an impressive volume
on the relationship of religion, history, and scholarship. While most observers of
contemporary events would not doubt that religion remains important, Sterk and Caputo
are right to point out in their introduction that scholars are still struggling with
the right balance in treating it: neither triumphalist nor reductionist,
simultaneously sensitive to religious experience and responsive to various
methodological challenges. It is to the editors' credit that Faithful
Narratives takes religious thought and experience seriously: by assembling a
rich array of historians as contributors, the book offers both fine scholarship and
important models for thinking, writing, and teaching about "faith as a historical
force" (4). The chronological scope of the volume is wide-ranging, from the late
Roman Empire to contemporary America, with a focus on what the editors call "issues
generated in a specifically 'Western' Christian context" (which includes Judaism).
The African Christian experience is also treated here in relation to missionary and
translation work.

This book is the outcome of a project with multiple layers--a three-semester series
from 2008-2009 at the University of Florida during which the contributing authors
delivered public lectures and led seminars for graduate students and faculty, as well
as a panel at the 2011 American Historical Association meeting. In order that the
book might also be of use to undergraduates and the "general community" (vii), the
editors chose twelve scholars whose work has "exemplified compelling strategies for
negotiating the difficulties inherent" in the study and teaching of religion in
history (3). In this they were very successful, for many of the contributors to this
volume are not only leading lights in their own fields but have also been able to
speak to wider audiences: for instance, Peter Brown, Anthony Grafton, and Mark Noll.
The essays are almost uniform in their clarity and accessibility, as the authors
effectively convey the larger implications of their particular subjects. If the third
element of the subtitle, "objectivity," (meaning here "scholarly integrity," 2) is
not always an explicit element of discussion in the collected essays, it is certainly
implicitly on display in the historians themselves.

The editors also conceive of this book as a contribution to debates about secularism
and modernity. While the chapters about earlier time periods help readers reflect on
the relationship between the secular and sacred, it is really only the latter third
of the volume (appropriately dealing with modernity), that explicitly addresses--and
challenges--the "master narrative of secularization," in which "modern" is equated
with "secular" (6). If challenges to this narrative are not exactly new, they are
certainly still needed, for, as the editors show, the narrative is not going away
easily.

The book is organized into three parts of four essays each, all in chronological
sequence. The first section is entitled "Late Antique and Medieval Religious Debates
and their Modern Implications." The second is "Early Modern Perspectives on
Spirituality, Culture, and Religious Boundaries." The volume concludes with "From the
Premodern to the Modern World: Sacred Texts, Individual Agency, and Religious
Identity," which focuses on subjects from the eighteenth century to the present day.
Within each historical section, therefore, there are somewhat different emphases.

The opening essay, Susanna Elm's "Pagan Challenge, Christian Response: Emperor
Julian and Gregory of Nazianzus as Paradigms of Interreligious Discourse," examines
the impact of Julian's writings on the development of Gregory's theology. By taking
Julian seriously as a religious thinker, and by attending closely to Gregory's
orations as responses to Julian, Elm works to overcome the "binary narratives" that
often ignore the close, "religious" interactions of Christian theologians and pagans
in the late Roman Empire (18). Peter Brown's "Between Syria and Egypt: Alms, Work,
and the 'Holy Poor'" emerged from the research for his recent work on poverty in Late
Antiquity, yet this essay has its own emphases as it asks, "[W]ho, actually, were
'the poor'?" in the third and fourth centuries (32). To answer this question, Brown
traces the contrasts between, on the one hand, a Syrian monastic tradition that saw
monks as entitled to monetary support to free them from shameful labor, and on the
other, the Egyptian monastic tradition represented by St. Anthony, the tradition
which ultimately triumphed and which insisted that monks ought to work and provide
alms to the truly needy. John Van Engen's essay, "Medieval Monks on Labor and
Leisure," continues along similar lines, focusing on twelfth-century monastic
attitudes towards work and leisure. Paying close attention to terminology, Van Engen
argues for the recognition of religion's role in shaping concepts often deemed
'secular.' He shows the precise process whereby monks revalued work by identifying
tasks such as prayer and reading as equivalent to manual labor, but only by seeing
these tasks as spiritual guards against "idle leisure" (61). The final contribution
to part one is David Nirenberg's "Sibling Rivalries, Scriptural Communities: What
Medieval History Can and Cannot Teach Us about Relations between Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam." By his own admission, this essay is "as much sermon as
science" (79), addressing what Nirenberg sees as the doleful effects of contemporary
misunderstandings of scriptural traditions and of what precisely the past can teach
us. At the same time, Nirenberg provides close textual exegesis of key scriptural
passages, in particular from the Quran, passages that themselves encourage multiple
interpretations; he does so to offer a persuasive model for how "Scripture itself
does not force us to choose between historicism and faith" (75).

Part two begins with "The People and the Book: Print and the Transformation of
Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe," by David B. Ruderman. Focusing on the "larger
patterns of cultural formation" in Jewish communities throughout early modern Europe
rather than specific subcultures (83), Ruderman argues that a major factor in the
creation of transregional Jewish culture was the role of the printing press. He
examines how the publication, for instance, of Joseph Caro's standardized legal code
blurred the boundaries between Sephardic and Ashkenazic commentary traditions. At the
same time, the appropriation by Christian Hebraists of printed texts such as the
kabbalah furthered the removal of interpretive authority from local Jewish
communities, even while creating opportunities for wider knowledge of Jewish culture.
Dovetailing well with Ruderman's conclusions is Anthony Grafton's essay, "The Jewish
Book in Christian Europe: Material Texts and Religious Encounters." Highlighting the
efforts in particular of three Christian Hebraists--Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon,
and Johann Buxtorf--Grafton clearly articulates the beginnings of the field of
comparative religion by describing the "range of ways in which early modern Europeans
responded to contact with the Jewish books that suddenly filled their libraries, and
sometimes challenged their parochialism" (114). The next chapter brings a change of
continents: Spanish missionaries in Peru are the subjects of Kenneth Mills' "Mission
and Narrative in the Early Modern Spanish World: Diego de Ocaña's Desert in Passing."
Mills offers a model for confronting the challenge of reading early-modern religious
texts: "near-immersion," that is, trying to understand how and why spiritual writings
"not only persuaded but moved" their readers (115). Mills highlights Ocaña's early
seventeenth-century missionary narrative, taking seriously Ocaña's "self-conception"
and his attempts to draw his readers into a powerful "interior journey" (131). The
final essay in this section, Carlos Eire's "Incombustible Weber: How the Protestant
Reformation Really Disenchanted the World," takes aim at Weber's theory of
disenchantment. Eire wants to look at disenchantment "in non-Weberian terms," that
is, to shift the scholarly focus of the Protestant Reformation's "disenchantment"
away from a magic/religion dichotomy and instead towards a description of the
Reformation as "a fundamental shift in the way in which reality is conceived, ...a
'desacralization'" (135). Eire's method is to grant beliefs "a causative role" in
history (133), and he does so by ambitiously reformulating the effects of the
Reformation into three categories that highlight desacralization: 1) a split between
matter and spirit, 2) the redrawing of boundaries between natural and supernatural,
and 3) the breaking of connections between the living and the dead.

The first essay of the final section is Phyllis Mack's "Religion and Gender in
Enlightenment England: The Problem of Agency." Mack introduces a new
theme--gender--in her examination of two female religious leaders, the Quaker Abiah
Darby and the Methodist Mary Fletcher. Mack probes the relationship between modernity
and religion: as she traces Darby's and Fletcher's prominent roles in turning the
energies of their communities away from ecstatic prophecy and towards charitable
work, she shows that these women's religious experiences were "part of the process of
modernization itself" (153). Following this piece is Susannah Heschel's
"Constructions of Jewish Identity through Reflections on Islam," which explores how
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jews formed their own religious identity by
studying Islam and even imitating Muslims. Through the work of Jewish scholars such
as Abraham Geiger, Islam was viewed favorably as the "religious fruit" of Judaism
(171), a notion that offered Judaism renewed significance. The role of intercultural
relations is the subject of the next essay as well, "Bible, Translation, and Culture:
From the KJV to the Christian Resurgence in Africa" by Lamin Sanneh. After an account
of the principles of translation in the King James Bible, Sanneh jumps quickly to
nineteenth-century Africa, but it is there that he is able to focus on the intriguing
translation work of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first African bishop of Nigeria, who
rendered the Bible into Yoruba beginning in 1850. Sanneh argues for the significant
historical role of vernacular translations, which proved crucial to "recasting
Christianity in the idiom and psyche" of African culture (195). The great success of
Christianity in Africa, Sanneh concludes, is yet another argument that undermines
scholarly assertions of the dominance of secularism. Rounding off the whole volume is
Mark A. Noll's contribution, "Reflections on the Bible and American Political Life."
More overview than investigation, Noll's piece draws on some of the themes traced in
the book by touching on key aspects of the complicated presence of the Bible in
modern (i.e., nineteenth- and twentieth-century) American politics. Highlighting both
Abraham Lincoln's theological use of Scripture in his Second Inaugural Address and
Solomon Schechter's claims for the Bible's centrality in America, Noll concludes by
arguing that the Bible can best be used in particular political situations only by
keeping in mind that its more universal dimensions transcend those
particularities.

The quality of the book's chapters is matched by the editors' attention to the
volume's presentation and critical apparatus. The footnotes are informative yet not
overwhelming, a choice consistent with Sterk and Caputo's desire to have these essays
speak not only to specialists but to a wider community. There are very few
typographical errors and even fewer places where repetitious passages are in need of
pruning. In sum, Faithful Narratives offers discussions of religion
in history that will not only deepen scholars' understanding but will also act as
models for how to navigate the terrain of religious experience with intellectual
integrity.